561. How Trump’s Chaos Keeps Splintering the World Order
2026-08-11 23:00:00 • 56:52
What happens to the world when it stops believing American promises, American leadership,
and stops believing in Donald Trump's boasting of his own greatness?
In recent days, we've had some answers.
Nuclear Pakistan, oil rich Saudi, and Turkey, one of the biggest conventional militaries
in the world, coming together to form a new strategic alliance, and with Egypt next
in line, it seems talk of an Islamic NATO.
The Iran war grinds on no end in sight, US munitions seemingly low, and that being
watched closely and exploited by Russia and by China from Ukraine to Taiwan.
And as an explosive laden drone is found inside Lipsy Airport as the German government warns
of being subject to daily hybrid warfare.
US and European intelligence agencies both warning Russia may be about to test NATO's
solidarity, either with some kind of attack on a Baltic state or even Poland.
August used to be called this silly season because nothing much happened during the summer.
Right now, not least with wildfires burning all over Europe, lots is happening, lots of
it serious, and all of it is really related to this question, how do we make sense of this
ever-changing world order?
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Welcome to the restist-politics with me, Rory Stewart.
And me, Anna Stegample.
And today we will be talking about the development of a new, almost NATO-type alliance, which has
emerged between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan.
We'll be asking, what does this mean for the new world which the Trump administration
had hoped to bring into being?
And then in the second half, we'll move on to these hybrid attacks by Russia, particular
recent drone attack in Leipzig, which are testing Germany and indeed the security of Europe,
and linking that to the broader question of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
So a lot to get into, but all of it fundamentally comes down to the question of global peace
and global order, Alistair Ovedi.
Well, I've found this Saudi-Turkey Pakistan agreement absolutely fascinating.
These are countries that don't always get on terribly well.
They've had their own spats in recent years, but they've signed something called the Mecca
Joint Defense Agreement.
And Hamid bin Salman, Saudi-Leber, Erdogan from Turkey, and Shabbar Sharif, Prime Minister
of Pakistan, getting together.
We can't know that much because weirdly for something that's been built as a great new
agreement, there's not really a big text of this.
What we're going on, essentially is one line where they basically say that any attack against
any of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all.
Because that's what made people make the link with NATO, NATO Article 5, and Attack on
One, is an attack on all.
So I think this is much more of a strategic pitch.
And I do think to go back to the point you just made, this is about them working out how
do they adapt to a sense of, for them, America not as reliable as it historically might have
been.
Iran, on the one hand, Israel, on the other, being very, very, very powerful within their
area.
These are coming together.
And they're essentially saying, look, we are now partners.
I mentioned Egypt in the introduction.
I think Egypt may be lining up, and again, that's a country that's had some difficulties
with some of these new partners.
But this, I think, is all a response to, not directly, but at the tipping point for this,
I think, was America's attack on Iran.
And the consequences for all of the countries in the region to that.
The interesting thing about what's happened over the last few months is that having
US bases and having US presence in the Middle East for 60, 70 years has been seen as
an almost guarantee of protection, almost immunity, not 100%.
But pretty much that was the idea.
You had a US base, and in return, the US would protect you.
And that began to crack apart with some houthi attacks from Yemen, against some of the Gulf
states, which the US didn't, and as she responded to that, that's going back a few years
now.
Then the Israeli attacks against Qatar, and now, of course, most dramatically, once
Iran found itself under attack, it began lashing out at the Gulf states, and the US has
really struggled to protect them.
That's one big body blow.
America is no longer providing protection and immunity.
The second thing is that these states have quite a long history, particularly Saudi
Arabian Pakistan, of already cooperating covertly.
For many, many years now, without really discussing it, there have been Pakistani pilots training
in Saudi Arabia actually flying Saudi planes.
There have been Pakistani munitions on the ground.
Pakistan is basically a military government.
So although it's Shabbat Shri Fuh signed it as we often say on the podcast, it's really
the chief of the army staff who has the great whip hand in Pakistan.
He's the guy that goes for intimate lunches with Trump in the Oval Office.
Just on that row, I seen Munir, the field marshal, he was with MBS the day before this all
happened.
They went off to some religious event together.
So yeah, he is incredibly important in this equation.
The other thing I think is that this is unlike what would have happened if this had happened
20 years ago.
The Saudi economy and the Turkish economies are very, very considerable things.
Turkey is now one of the real military powers of the world.
It's got extraordinary industrial capacity.
It's drones, programs are impressive.
It was very much associated with this Azerbaijany victory in Nagorno-Karabakh and of course
the victory in Syria, where it was the Turks that backed the new Syrian President as he
ruled down against Peshawar Al-Assad.
Another wrinkled Turkey is of course a NATO member.
So one question in the back of everyone's head is, is there something that could have been
done to prevent this happening?
This is not ideal.
There are some people I noticed in Washington beginning to try to spin it and say, this is
exactly what we always wanted, which is people looking after their own affairs and burden
sharing.
This is not burden sharing because what happens when you set up something like this is that
you lose all the U.S. command and control.
Previously, all these countries would have had a very strong relationship with the head
of U.S. central command.
People like General Petraeus, these great sort of big, almost, I don't know, Roman
Putin-tates who would be sitting down with heads of state and would be running a very,
very complex coordinated thing with huge amounts for American assets on the ground working
with these countries.
This is setting up something which has no U.S. imprint coordination or strategy at all
and that's something that I think should really worry Washington over you.
Well, it was fascinating when this thing came out to see the way that the three countries
involved, the way that they were framing it and projecting it because they were all slightly
different and then also the way that other countries were reacting.
Just to give the framing first.
So, Turkey, as you say, I mean, Turkey's got the second biggest military, second biggest
army in NATO after the United States.
It's a major military power.
Part of the Turkish government, Erdogan in particular, when he was signing it, quite keen to say
this does not, as it were, in any way, threaten our commitments within NATO.
But other voices within Turkey saying, well, actually this is much more a kind of something
that's closer to our coordinated with some of our political and religious beliefs.
Then the Saudis, I got a message from somebody I know in Saudi who said, if you're confused
about what this is all about, check out a guy called Ali Shiharbi.
Now, don't you know Ali Shiharbi?
Ali Shiharbi is a Saudi commentator who is thought to be very, very close to the royal
court.
It's a bit, how some people used to see me when I was a journalist writing about what
the Labour Party might be thinking of doing.
We're back in the day where we were in opposition.
So I checked out Ali Shiharbi and he said this, this military alliance reflects a recognition
that American deterrence has been significantly weakened and that the Iranian threat will
increasingly need to be managed by regional powers.
So, that goes to the heart of what we've been talking about.
How are people responding to Trump responding to this very, very different sense of an American
foreign policy?
And then of course Pakistan is fascinating because you know Pakistan very much defines its foreign
policy in relation to India.
And it's India by the way, it was Indian newspapers that started talking about an Islamic
NATO, a Muslim NATO, a Sunni NATO.
And so, but the Pakistan is they, I don't think, want necessarily to be seen as nuclear
protectors of Saudi Arabia or of Turkey.
So you are then having to work through what would this mean in practice?
If let's say there was another fight between India and Pakistan, are the Saudis meant
to get involved, are the Turks meant to get involved?
Are the Turks and the Pakistanis why are they not already getting involved in the flare-up
that started again with the Houthis in Yemen?
So I think it's sowing a lot of doubt.
And that I think is when you say there's no American impromptu on this, I think they're
struggling to work out exactly what this means and why it's come around at this time.
So what it doesn't yet have is what made NATO more than just an alliance of countries
makes NATO an integrated fighting force.
And I won't get into all the jargon of the different NATO systems and structures that
do this.
And I think that the most important thing is that NATO is a very important and important
system.
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And I think that NATO was, he was back in the protests against the Saudis.
And they were very, very angry because they saw that as a threat to their whole kind of monarchical system.
You mentioned the UAE there.
The Saudis and the UAE were fighting Turkey in Libya.
They supported CC of Egypt, former general, absolute military figure,
who Erdogan in the past has denounced.
What brought those two together, I think is Gaza.
And I think we shouldn't underestimate Gaza's role in this.
Both Erdogan and CC are really worried, not just about what Israel is doing in Gaza,
where Erdogan in particular has been very, very, very critical to the point where
lots of Israelis have painted in them.
I think one of the leadership contenders for the upcoming Israeli election has basically said that Erdogan
is an anti-Semitic dictator.
But both CC and Erdogan are on the kind of genocide side of the debate.
They're also worried about the tax that have been on Lebanon and Syria.
And so I think that's what's brought them together.
But it is, as you say, it is interesting that Egypt's not there as it were at stage one.
The talk is that they will be joining this at stage two.
And that's when it does start to look like a much more formed thing.
And just on the point about what we're talking about,
like a much more formed thing.
And just on the point about Rory about shape,
and I have a call of experience of shape because I was working there during the
the cost of a war.
And it feels like a kind of mini-United Nations.
I mean, you've got all these countries, all the sort of fighting over who gets the deputy job this and the deputy job that.
And how do you balance America's power against the powers of the other countries that are involved?
But there's this very interesting guy.
The reason why I think there's a bit of division going on in Turkey.
Erdogan projected this very much not in the NATO article five.
He talked about article 51 of the UN Charter,
which is the inherent right of everybody to be able to defend themselves.
It was the foreign minister, Hakkan Fidan,
who I think it would be great person to talk to of the podcast because he's a fascinating figure.
He said, quote, it's technically the same as Article five of the NATO treaty.
He went on to say there would be a permanent secretary at,
based in Saudi Arabia,
regular committee meetings between the defense ministers, the foreign ministers, and the heads of the military.
And said Egypt would join a later stage because it was a quote's natural partner.
So I don't know whether he is, as it were, pushing the envelope while Erdogan carries on doing the more subtle diplomacy.
But I think that was a very, very interesting seeming divide in the Turkish interpretation of this.
Let me just come to the thing that I think is the thing that was said.
I come to the thing that I think is the thing that was keeping me awake at night,
which is what this means for the world and the big US picture.
So you've just pointed to the NATO shape thing.
And I think what you saw when you were in Kosovo and what I think is
we're not putting a proper price on is that what the United States was able to do
from the end of the Second World War until about 2016.
And in some ways until 2024 was have something which it's almost impossible to put a price on.
The US as the global superpower was able to write the strategy for the world.
Almost every component ally played into an American system.
And it was only the Americans who had the full global picture.
The British tried to do this before the First World War,
but it has been many, many decades since France or Britain or Germany has pretended
to be able to do what the United States was able to do, which is sit there thinking,
okay, we need air defenses in South Korea, we need Patriot missiles for China.
We're balancing that with the need for counterinsurgency warfare troops that may have to be deployed in the Middle East.
We're having to think about tanks in Russia.
This is where our air lift is. This is where our seven fleets are.
And they were doing it with a European countries which were increasingly large in terms of their expenditure.
Trump often boasts that he's increased NATO expenditure.
And what this meant is that the US was able to leverage Europeans who were spending about 500 billion a year on defense
with the US pushing towards about 900 billion.
If we meet our targets heading towards 2035, the amount that Europe,
that though and Canada, the non-US NATO members will be spending will be staggering.
Right, we'll be pushing up to probably something approaching two thirds of US expenditure.
All of that relied on the fact that the US could use that.
It could almost double the size of its own troops, not quite, but certainly significantly increase its reach.
And not just its reach, not just that it was able to use its Western allies for boots on the ground.
It could use our bases, which was very important.
And we just seen this with Iran with the fight, so whether or not Spain would allow the US to use bases,
whether Britain would allow the US to use base could use our bases, could use our intelligence,
could use our diplomatic pressure, could use our networks.
Now, what's happened is that all of that has been destroyed,
because the US has gone pennywise, pound foolish.
Hegsith and Trump appear to see the world in this crazy black and white way,
where they think, well, what we're going to do is we're going to save some money by removing a US brigade,
or we will insult the Europeans over Greenland, or we won't follow through on our NATO guarantees.
And it doesn't matter, because we're spending a trillion dollars,
we're going to save money in Europe, we'll save money in the Middle East,
we'll bring it all home and we'll be stronger, but they're not stronger, they're much weaker.
Because what they can't put a price on is everything that they're losing in terms of their alliances,
their influence, their bases, their intelligence, things which would cost much more to rebuild now they've lost them.
Well, I guess is that a useful place to talk about what has been the big debate within the US in recent years?
Which relates to the cost of munitions used and the cost of munitions which they may seek to replace.
Because there's something very, very strange going on here.
On the one hand, Donald Trump is saying we're going to hunt down the people who are leaking out this fake news about
as not having munitions.
And on the other hand, hegsith is going back to Congress to ask for even more money,
because this war is costing so much more than they thought it would when they said they'd be able to sort out the
Iranians in days.
The other really interesting thing to me that speaks to what you've just said is that Iran,
which we say right at the start, has got a greater tolerance threshold for this kind of conflict.
I used in the introduction the word, you know, they feel emboldened.
And so they've issued a warning, and this was issued by the National Security Council,
which is, you know, right at the top of the Islamic Republic regime, said the United States must never again threaten the Islamic Republic,
call for the United States to lift its naval blockade, lift sanctions,
withdraw the US military from Iran, pay war reparations, release frozen assets,
end all attacks on Iran allies in the region and threats against the country.
Now, I think when this whole thing started, if that had been there, I mean, they did all the sort of belligerent war talk stuff,
but for them to do that, and for it not to land with people like you and me in a real saying,
well, this is just utterly absurd, I think suggests that Trump is in a much, much worse position in relation to what's happening around
than we're being led to believe. And the cost on the munitions, so the war's cost up to sort of 40 billion.
The Patriot interceptors, and I mentioned again that there's a link to Ukraine here because, you know, Zelensky's constantly saying,
there's one thing I need is the Patriot interceptors, and America has used so many of them in tackling the attacks from Iran that they're kind of running out.
It's really startling. We've covered in the podcast before that the Patriot systems are these exquisite, very expensive systems,
a lot of them designed with a lot of Raytheon components, which do something very unique that almost nobody else in the world is able to do.
And one of them is to intercept these extraordinary ballistic missiles, missiles coming down at hypersonic speeds.
And this is really what we were very worried that Ukraine was being deprived of as the US withdrew its support,
because although Ukraine is able to do really good stuff with drones, it doesn't have systems that can hit these very fast-moving ballistic missiles.
The Patriots have incredible optical equipment and extraordinary designs, and nobody in the world has ever been able to replicate how extraordinary these Patriot missiles systems are.
But America was very worried. It was running out of them. Very worried that it was running out of them, partly because the story had always been that it needed to keep them in the Pacific in case there was a threat from China.
And the story was it couldn't afford to give these things to Ukraine, couldn't even afford to supply them if you're wanted to buy them.
This was one of the big arguments for the US getting out of Ukraine, is because it didn't have enough Patriots for China.
And then there's been this extraordinary reporting. CSIS has suggested that they have used something like half their Patriot missiles.
CNN suggests they may have used 80% of their Patriot missiles in Iran, against CSIS suggesting of these edifant systems, which were in South Korea they have may have used up.
As much as the third, CNN suggests from reporting inside the Pentagon it could be 50% of their entire stock. And these are things with a three-year lead time.
And they cost, every time they whack one off, it costs four million dollars. And of course what the Iranians, and this is very relevant to them, again, to talk about Russia, Ukraine, what the Iranians worked out is they can put a drone up there.
Of course, thing, you know, 20 grand, 30 grand, 40 grand, whatever it might be. But it's taking a Patriot interceptor to bring it down.
One of the, I could back to my point about Hexath, they love, and also about Trump's constant desire to boast about American power.
The whole thing has been projected. We are so powerful, we have such military power. This is like, you know, Darlington against Paris and Germain.
But it's not. And the Iranians have worked out, just as the Ukrainians as the underdog have worked out against Russia. They've worked out the way that warfare has changed, gives them an advantage when it comes to this kind of big, against small warfare.
Maybe a time era, just to get the current episode of leading with Johnny Mercer, the former veterans minister, where I thought he was fascinating about his own life, fascinating about his mental health.
But I thought one of the most interesting parts of the interview was when he was talking about his sadness and his kind of bit of anger as well, that Al Karns is not in the government, Al Karns, the former military guy who was defense minister under Kierstarmer.
And because he was saying he absolutely gets this the way that technology is changing warfare and making it harder for the bigger powers sometimes to tackle the so-called smaller powers.
And I think that's what we're seeing in the battle in Iran right now.
I was just trying again to play devil's advocate with myself and try to make the Republican case, make the Hexath case.
You're trying to be in frontino spin doctor, you're allowed to be a Hexath spin doctor.
I can Hexath spin doctor. So if I were Hexath spin doctor, what they're trying to run at the moment is the story that the United States couldn't afford to pay for the whole world.
Other people needed to burden share, Middle East needed to pay for its own defense, Europe needed to pay for its own defense.
And this is the story they would spin at you. They would say, well, look, turned out that when we withdrew our support from Ukraine and saved ourselves $100 billion, Ukraine didn't collapse.
Instead, Europe stepped up, footed the bill and Ukraine is still surviving. They would say we had great success in Venezuela, amazing special forces operation, no soldiers killed.
Cuba is now about to collapse and that will be a US foreign policy objective if they've had for decades that they have hit Iran with incredible precision weapons and that they have massively degraded their economy and their strike capacity.
They will say that their ally Israel has never been stronger. It's not a regional hedgeman that Syria is now an American ally that hammers and his ballarish shadow of their former selves and that the US is about to spend a trillion dollars a year on its defense.
And it's going to become more and more war ready, warrior culture promoting tough guys like Hexath, more and more kill ready to operate.
And that Russia didn't manage to defend its allies in Venezuela and in Iran and Syria in the way that people expected that China has found itself in an awkward position because it's been unable to get its fuel supplies through and also wasn't really able to support Venezuela or Iran.
So the paradox is this given all of that what they seem to have done is two things that they went wrong in ways they didn't anticipate the first is that by saving money they actually weakened themselves for the reasons we were talking about earlier because they ended up instead of having reliable allies they changed it from them being a deterrent of last resort able to use help for allies into a world in which they became an exploitative force weaponizing dependency and just driving their allies away.
But the second odd thing is with their enemies because the actual truth is that they haven't created a more peaceful world Iran which they've hit hard is more dangerous than it was before Russia feels more dangerous than it was before China paradoxically feels more dangerous than it was before because the world's been so distracted by this other chaos that actually China can just sit back while America consumes its patron missile programs destroys its allies.
So paradoxically by hitting hard and doing these things they've actually made their adversaries more desperate more violent and hitting them harder than if they'd left them alone in the first place every day.
Well, I think what you did there though was you highlighted the difference between a political communications case which can be made and you made that in a way that X is probably would make it.
But the longer term strategic questions are not operating in America's favor. I do think there's an element to which Trump became so emboldened by the speed of the operation in Venezuela the relative success of it the fact that Delci Rodriguez then came in and is sort of more or less doing the Americans bidding.
We said right at the start Iran is a completely different level of opponent. I also think that maybe the one the other thing I used to talk about what keeps you awake at night.
We talked a little bit in recent weeks about nuclear proliferation. I just wonder on this Saudi Pakistan Turkey deal the extent to which the Pakistan is the only Muslim nation with nukes is a factor or isn't a factor.
I can remember back in the day there's this guy you will know I'm talking about that everybody called a coup a coup can was the Pakistani nuclear physicist and engineer who was broadly known as the father of the Pakistan nuclear weapon when he died I think he died about five six years ago.
He was celebrated his nickname was the savior of the nation etc etc etc and I can remember post 9 11 for example I remember all the meetings that we had intelligence Tony Blair would always at some point say what's a queue up to what we know about a queue what's he's up to he was this sort of giant figure with the nuclear debate when we think about Pakistan's nuclear weapons I think we tend to think of them in terms of Pakistan India Kashmir and that very very tense difficult relationship does this.
Does this bring Saudi and Turkey under a nuclear umbrella now I don't know the answer to that my sense is that they're trying to play that down but I think it's another reason why this became such a big thing when these three countries came together and announced this for all the different framing that they put on it.
And it connects to the story that we were covering two weeks ago which was this story that the US was suddenly going to allow Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium which is part of the precursor to its own nuclear weapons program potentially although they framed it as civilian and again you heard voices from Washington saying this looks like America's got reckless and is giving Saudi nuclear weapon but the reason we have to do it is that if we don't other people will.
And the implication was that China now is in a position to provide a civilian nuclear program or maybe as you say Pakistan and this again is balance of power I was thinking about the fact that there are you and Tony Blair sitting around a table talking about this stuff one of the big changes is the relationship between countries like Britain and country site tellkin Saudi Arabia since 1989 so since I need nine the British economy is broadly grown through four times larger the economy society Arab and Turkey 15 times larger.
They were in 1989 so one of the reasons why the US is now having to make concessions that it never would have considered doing when when you were in office is that Saudi is so much wealthier has so many more options and China of course has much more capacity to build some nuclear programs so the ability of everybody to shop around and not be dependent on the US is much greater which is why it's even more reckless and mad that the US rather than leaning into these relationships.
It's treasuring them bringing people ever closer to themselves decided to weaponize them at a time when there are alternatives out there.
Yeah and I also I was surprised we had some pretty interesting reactions to this new alliance from India the Indian government as opposed to the Indian media was playing it down a bit they were being very restrained and I think that was their way of saying we don't see this as react to the Saudis having left us because they didn't inflame it they didn't in the way give Pakistan what they probably wanted.
The Iranians likewise was they weren't that angry there were some politicians of lower orders who came out and said you know this is pathetic the foreign minister we used it to talk about the importance of Muslim unity when Muslims stand together we can face every challenge by militias outside his head on Israel we talked about but there wasn't much from Europe and I feel that you know remember when we talked to Ali's understub the president of Finland and we were talking about what a new Europe might look like and what a developing European.
The European defense architecture might look like he talked about Ukraine and Turkey so I was a bit alarmed that there was almost like this was this was seen as as a policy of interest the United States and the countries involved in their regions as opposed to Europe.
That's exactly right so if we were to complete right and I'm you're right we should have got there earlier if we're really caring about shaping a middle power future of Europe Canada UK etc it should have been Europe working out how to bring Turkey on side potentially Saudi Arabia.
Qatar into a middle power alliance rather than allowing it to chip off into yet another kind of micro alliance that the dream has to be US China and a bigger European Western that alliance that hopefully brings in places like Turkey and Saudi rather than sending them out into yet another spinning block.
Well listen should we take a break and then come back and talk about all sorts of interesting things going on in Europe related to Russia and also Ukraine and the johni mercer interview that I mentioned which I really do recommend to people just search for this policy leading wherever you get your podcast as all sorts of reasons why it's worth listening to but some of them relate to what we've just been talking about.
And when we come back we'll talk about Russia Ukraine and some very interesting things going on in relation to drone warfare drone politics and even drone organized crime.
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Welcome back to the rest of politics and me asked Campbell and me Rory should so Rory we talked a lot about this Pakistan Saudi turkey deal we mentioned that you know there is a relation here to Russia Ukraine I'll just put that into context in the words of President Zelensky he said this week that the number of air defense missiles being provided to Ukraine by Western allies dropped threefold this year 2026 compared with the same period of 2020.
On Wednesday just a one day last week there were 28 missiles fired by Russia that the Ukrainians fell to intercept 17 deaths and Zelensky unsurprisingly said they could have saved the lives of those killed today now bound to say that et cetera but it just you know real life consequences for America which under Biden in particular was giving a lot of this kind of military support when the Americans are now having to use elsewhere it means less for you create.
Yeah just just just a technical point on that just again to bring it bring it home because we talked about this a lot where Ukraine is very powerful and I'm you're I think you're going to get on to this is on countering drones things like the Shahid system which is this Iranian drone these are quite slow moving systems and the Ukrainians of the world's pioneers in quite cheap solutions to taking out those cheap drones but they have a much bigger problem with these ballistic missiles that Russia produced a much smaller numbers move 17.
So there's a lot of energy a month which come hurtling out of space at many times the speed of sound and there it's only these petric missile systems that are able to do three different things they're able to have the radar to identify them they're able to have the compute to do these incredible calculations on exactly how they're turning and moving and then the precision motors to allow them to actually intercept they often strike them straight on in order to detonate them in the air and that's what Ukraine has not been able to do Trump was talking about giving Ukraine.
The technology to manufacture these stuff themselves and as usual with Trump he's now backtracked and said he's not sure that's a very good idea.
The other interesting development on the kind of Ukrainian strategic front is they are now going much deeper into Russia in all sorts of different ways and I'd be fascinated by these attacks on wild berries which wild berries is this is sometimes called Russian Amazon.
So this is like an online platform where you can buy all sorts of stuff and Ukraine is claiming it's a military target because lots of the stuff that wild berries is responsible for is ending up at the front line but that's them taking this whole thing into the economic sphere as well as the military sphere.
And then the other thing we we should maybe talk about in relation to drones rory the lots of stuff going on.
So first of all a light sick airport bus driver is wondering around the light sick airport and it looks at his window and he thinks that's very odd I've never seen one of those before.
It turns out to be a drone is absolutely laden with explosives and it's not far from a place where a lot of western stuff is being delivered to Ukraine.
And did you get these are my right that he sort of somehow stopped it with his hand or he he certainly which often realized that this was not right that he'd never see what it should be here.
So he certainly fiddle around with it which terrifies with the thought of it.
We haven't got the exact details I think released by the German government yet but it seems to have been a quadcopter which is not a very very large thing depending on whether it's the sort of thing that you buy if you're kids or a more commercial thing.
You're still probably talking about something that you can hold in your hands but seems to have had explosives in it over here.
Yeah and I think we should both agree we do not buy one of these for your kids that would be a very very very bad thing to do.
So there's that going on there's the German interior minister saying in all sorts of ways we're facing hybrid attacks most days left right and center.
We've then had the Lithuanians warning they say that and presumably based on intelligence but basically saying that Russia is considering putting together a false flag attack against critical infrastructure in the Baltics using Ukrainian drones.
This is why this was there was another event this week where a drone landed and went off very near to the border between Romania and Bulgaria very close to a very important gas pipeline as yet not entirely established the provenance thereof.
It seems the one in light seek people are pretty certain that the Russians somehow got that there.
You're assuming an airport pretty tight security while you but they got one in there and then the other thing which I think is...
So you were just saying that I think this is the connection isn't it that the one that was found in Bulgaria seems to have been a Ukrainian.
And then again the question is is this a Ukrainian drone that's gone off track and we've seen a bit of that actually as far away as the Baltic occasion reports of Ukrainian drones going off track or whether it's as you say the Russians beginning to use Ukrainian drones themselves.
Yeah as I say I don't think there's 100% clear yet but the initial indications of the Bulgarian government is that this is likely Ukrainian which either went straight or was being used for the wrong purposes.
But what it does show is that this relates to the discussion we had in the first half is that drone warfare now is transforming the nature of real life battles including between major powers.
Can I just sit on on this it's a really weird phenomenon isn't it because you're completely right it's very worrying but it's not worrying in the way that you might first think if you were to say to people Russian drone warfare hybrid warfare against Europe they would probably I guess imagine something on an enormous scale huge coordinated cyber attacks rail attacks road attacks airport attacks and that's not what we're seeing.
What we're seeing is every few months something happening so like the car I think this is the second time this airport which is the key logistics hub for DHL and does quite a lot of supply into Ukraine has been targeted we've seen these drones going into a Scandinavia we've seen the polls responding.
But these are things at pretty small scale happening as I say every few weeks or months then we've seen this phenomenon of sabotage attacks so you talked about the fire bombing attack on Kierstown's house you've seen attacks on warehouses there was an assassination attempt against the head of Ryan metal but again these have tended to be it seems people recruited on telegram paid a few thousand euro and pretty incompetently delivered.
So what's going on what what this isn't is a phase zero pre campaign for the invasion of Lithuania this is not the Russian intelligence services releasing you know like so you during the second wall setting Europe ablaze before an invasion it seems to be something else what exactly is it well one theory is what they're doing is that they're testing European defenses and response times so they found out for example in Denmark that these drones are not spotted by the military they're spotted by civilians walking their
dogs they found out that Friedrich met takes about two months before he's able to identify a Russian is behind something they find out they can get this stuff into Leipzig they can fly stuff from shadow fleets but I'm not sure that that's the key because my sense is if you were the Russian intelligence services you probably would have guessed already that drones are pretty ambiguous and that European government's going to struggle to identify them and struggle to identify who sent them around here's my my theory one of the things I think possibly going on is that these are training exercises.
The G.I.U. is keeping a capacity of G.I.U. the military intelligence keeping a capacity going thinking well why don't we try we've got the shadow fleets out there why don't we try flying some drones let's see whether this telegram mechanism works what happens if we offer a few thousand euros to someone to do something you're exercising a muscle and in the process you're also doing something else which is that you're forcing European governments to spend an incredible amount of money trying to work out how to defend against these things that's the version of your story around how around
does cheat drones and then get struck by millions of dollars so there's a question how does Europe get the reaction right because it might suit the
Kremlin if we ended up spending tens of billions of dollars putting together very very complex defense mechanisms against the quadcopter that you can buy for $800 on Amazon.
Yeah well there was that that debate was raging within the German politics and media on the back of this quadcopter being found inside the airport.
You know we all know the airports are you have to go through security it can be very bullsaking it got increased after 9.11 and you know for the freight.
It's even the security should be even tighter often isn't so there was a debate how did this happen how did this thing get through and you then have politicians all running off saying we should be doing this we should be doing that it costs this it costs that and we're talking about a you know pretty pretty big scale here so just the ones that have been cited in in the two months after.
The one that shut down to airports in Scandinavia it was almost a hundred sightings across 15 NATO countries.
Germany and Belgium were the two that seems to be most targeted Germany probably because it's the biggest country in Europe and Belgium possibly because that's where NATO shape orders that we talked about earlier is based and meanwhile there was this phrase I read which I think does explain partly why they keep doing this in the way that they do it and the phrase was provoking a collective anxiety attack is not just about making the
politicians feel they've got a problem with hands it's making all of us feel worried anxious nervous and that then gives the Russians the upper hand if you think about the invasion of Ukraine itself the buildup was huge.
You know we were talking about it for days and weeks beforehand I even wonder sometimes people talk about the amazing American intelligence operation to get their plans part of me wonders whether the Russians were actually you know not that fuss about that because it was building the levels of
of anxiety so I think this is something that that we haven't got a head round back to the point about what Johnny Mercer was saying in the leading interview about al-Khan's being on top of this the nature of a war in 2026 is so different to war even 10 20 years ago let alone the second world war that still defines for much of our political debate how we think about modern warfare.
Getting the right reaction and understanding what the Russian limits are and why they're doing so little as well as so much and I keep trying to get my head around this because as you say it's a lot of sightings but it's definitely not yet at a level where it's panicking European publics I don't think it's puzzling generals it's worrying policy makers but it's not it's not killing people I mean we're not we haven't seen I think in I'm think I'm renting in four years nobody in Europe's been killed by any of these Russian operations now part of that
must be that they're very aware that they don't want to actually provoke a more aggressive European response so I think they're taking a certain manner risk one of the stupid things if they're flying these drones off the shadow fleet is that might lead Europe to do what it should have done a long time ago which is finally just shut down the shadow fleet these illegal vehicles smuggling Russian oil out from which these drones seem to be being flown Europe hasn't yet followed through on confiscating this 200 billion dollars of Russian assets it uses the interest from it
but it's still held off taking the full Russian assets NATO hasn't deployed a headquarters forward into Ukraine so there's quite a lot of things quite a lot of pain Russia would experience if you were able to point to smoking gun and say oh you've actually literally here is a Russian connection to doing something that's genuinely big and particular I suppose that we worried about alienating Washington I'm also interested in whether there isn't and this is something we never quite know
what's the boundary between the Russians being very very smart and controlled compared to the possibility that G.I.U. Russian military intelligence is actually quite incompetent other limits to its capacity has there been a real impact on its capacity from shutting down many of the formal intelligence diplomats that run the Russian consulates and embassies across Europe does that make it more difficult for them to coordinate I wouldn't over push that because my senses Russia is a big place and if it wants to do more it can do much more we're just getting a glimpse of a capacity that could be a hundred times greater
Yeah but I think if you listen to the kind of the fairly neutral voices that try to cover the main battlefield Ukraine is killing a lot of Russians with and not least through its better use of drones we're talking in terms of Russian loss losses something like 30,000 men a month Ukraine and that you've got to be careful with all the figures but Ukraine just on that one sorry I mean you're complete right that is one of the figures out there what we do know is there are hundreds of thousands of casualties pinning down exactly how many killed and how many wounded is there
is quite tough yeah and that they're having to go back to some pretty brutal tactics to get Russian men to the frontline and that is bound over time
I know what you're saying this for four years there surely that is bound over time to sort of hit morale both on the frontline and at home where everybody now knows somebody
knows somebody who's lost their life or certainly knows somebody who is close to somebody who's lost their life on the frontline
where I mentioned organized crime there's this I don't know if you saw this extraordinary story about Colombia and I'm sure you noticed by the way that one of the few dignitaries who went to the swearing in of the new Colombian president was your fragility in Fatilo he was there with the with the right way leaders of Latin America
so this is the story I think it was the financial times that had this the Colombian drug dealers or drug business people have been sending people to Ukraine to fight in hope because it's a war and people can go and fight and they say they support the Ukraine you cause
but in part what they're doing is trying to learn from the way that the Colombian that the Ukrainians are using drones because they use drones in their armed conflict
to protect their industry in in Colombia we talk about our intended consequences of warfare I didn't understand this until I sat down with somebody who's a former British intelligence guy and then a former British
special forces guy talking about something which I think is really shocking and maybe we should dig into more and expose more which is the number of former British
intelligence and special forces people and Americans and Europeans in general who are operating as mercenaries on the front lines in Yemen
and across the Horn of Africa and in Sudan coordinating exactly these kinds of drone attacks and are being drawn into some of the most horrendous human rights
abuses in the world I mean we talk about UAE supporting the actions of Hermetti in Sudan and this genocide that happened in an attack on a town last year
but there are foreign including UK mercenaries right up there at the front line operating these drones
operating the kill systems coordinating controlling not always on the ground with the guns and some very interesting moral question I try to push this guy
you know what do you think when the people you're allied with just go in massacre thousands of women and children in a town
and I was very very troubled by the response which is I think there's a real moral blindness I think some of these guys
and I'm not saying as yeah uniquely British there are French there are there Americans there
there are Colombians there I mean interestingly Latin American mercenaries are very common that they're relatively affordable they can be deployed quite easily
just shrug their shoulders and say well everybody does it both sides are just as bad as each other I mean this whole world
of drones technology is spilling out of Ukraine so quickly the the front line in Sudan is much more high tech now than people understand
it's not just a rag bag of child soldiers with AK-47s there are people really there with fancy computers bits of kit and fancy drones which are either
Iranian drones or Turkish drones or Ukrainian drones or Russian drones learning from these systems from drug wars right the
way through to genocide in Africa yeah it underlies the point we're making through right this episode that the technology is changing the
nature of warfare technology has changed the nature of organized crime over the last decade or two but in 24 25 the government
Colombian government estimates that these cartels launched 264 drone attacks quite cheap usually dropping explosives on enemies
and the enemies might be other cartels or it might be the security forces Colombia says it managed to neutralize most of them 96%
either through jamming them or through destroying them but the 4% they get through can do an awful lot of damage
but here's just think about that there's you and I very very supportive of Ukraine Ukraine wants to have support
around the world politically and militarily and including volunteers you go there and here they are they
go in there some of them to take back expertise that they then use to carry on killing people through drugs
and and and the line between domestic surveillance and war is becoming smaller and smaller you
talked about the killing of the Hamas leader and many people will have actually seen the video caught by the
Israeli drone I mean it literally hovers goes into the building and you can see him wounded in the building shortly before
his shot so the experience on the ground and Gaza and actually for many people on the west bank now is these drones
very very close to you following you around monitoring you and making you feel that you could be killed at any
moment and and let's add the final thing to this which is AI because so much of what's happening at the
front line between Russian Ukraine is about shortening the kill chain which is this site you sinister phrase
for how do you make a decision more quickly to pull the trigger and how do you make these machines
autonomous so that they can't be jammed that the jamming gets between the operator and the and the drone
and if you give these drones independence they don't have to communicate with the operator and they
can't be jammed as easily and we may find that it's it may not be in Israel may not be in Russia Ukraine
maybe at front lines is places like Sudan where people start hacking and using AI systems to take humans
out of the kill chain entirely and where we'll first see these drones just flying around making their
own decisions about who to kill and when well Rory maybe that's a good place to end and to trail
question time tomorrow because one of the things we're going to be talking about is prisons and the
last time I was inside a prison one of the things they were briefing me on was the use of drones
they were having to tackle the drones being used to smuggle in drugs and telephones and very
sophisticated operations going on inside prisons using drones to get stuff into the prisoners I
thought that was a very neat and useful segue we're also going to be talking about the right
wing of politics more generally how do the Tories restore Britain and reform deal with each other
we're going to talk about Abdul El Said who's just won this primary in Michigan and what that says
about the future of the democrats and I want to talk about the river Rine because I'm very very
very alarmed about what's happening in the river Rine good looking forward to it very much see you then
so